


Duologue

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Bodyswap, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Feelings, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28142640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: It is, perhaps, strangely fitting that just when Roy thinks he has a handle on the state of things, an alchemical mishap switches his and Ed's corporeal forms.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 45
Kudos: 372
Collections: Roy/Ed Week 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to some not-late-yet-in-my-time-zone nonsense for [Roy/Ed Week](https://royedpalooza.tumblr.com), Day 2! \o/ I want to blame this partially on [Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OkaySky/pseuds/OkaySky) and [Mustard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustardbastard/pseuds/mustardbastard) for talking about Shamballa and making my brain go "PING", but we all know that it's my own fault for tossing bodyswap into the prompt list like "lol that's a trope I've never been interested in writing, so at least that day is safe!!"
> 
> h u b r i s :|
> 
> I'm about 16K into this monstrosity and attempting to dig my way free, so… stay tuned for more soon, I hope. o_o
> 
>  **One content warning:** There's a line in here in a later chapter where Roy reflects back on going "oH NO he's hot" when Ed was sixteen. It is a brief thought only, so I didn't feel like it merited the underage warning, but I am trying to be more conscientious about flagging things like that so that people don't get caught by surprise. ♥ ~~lbr though it's not my fault, Studio Bones wrote that shit in on purpose~~ what

“Hell,” Roy said, mostly under his breath. He didn’t need both eyes to spot the difference between a man leaving for a weekend trip, like they’d expected, and a man leaving for the market. “This is going to be more difficult than we thought.”

The corners of Ed’s mouth pulled down. Roy couldn’t let himself get distracted—couldn’t focus on them; couldn’t let his eye linger on them one at a time and measure every single motion against the catalogue of Ed’s expressions in his head. It had taken almost an entire year since Ed and Alphonse had crashed-landed back in Amestris like twin comets to convince Ed to take even a one-time, cut-and-dry contract with the military. Ed knowing that Roy was, perhaps, ever so slightly obsessed with his every movement… would likely not help matters. It would likely set matters both figuratively and literally on fire.

“This,” Ed said, “is why I don’t work with you people anymore.”

The suspicious alchemist du jour fired up the engine on his aging pickup truck. Roy forced himself to watch the wheels turning and the grit spitting out behind them.

Ed had been skittish and silent at intervals ever since his not-so-much-triumphant-as-miraculous return. He couldn’t know. Roy couldn’t let him.

“I thought you reveled in danger,” Roy said.

It was a calculated risk. Roy had a hunch about the shadows in Ed’s eyes these days, and the caution in his step—those were habits that trauma trained you into. What Ed had been through here, before, had never made him quite so careful. What had happened on the other side must have been worse.

“I do,” Ed said. The truck crunched its way down the gravel drive; rocks skittered as it veered towards the road. “I was talking about your compulsive need to state the obvious just to hear the sound of your own damn voice.” He levered himself upright, less fluidly than Roy remembered. The way that he straightened his shoulders, though, was entirely the same. “C’mon, we’ve probably got a little over two hours, if he’s buyin’ shit for the whole week.”

Roy had to admit that he hadn’t really been enjoying crouching in the bushes anyway. His knees weren’t up to the usual stakeout abuses anymore.

He was, of course, up to saying “At your service” as he got to his feet.

“Bull _shit_ you are,” Ed said, but in the fading sunlight, Roy thought that he might have caught a flicker of a smile.

  


* * *

  


“I’m not going to ask why you know how to pick locks,” Ed said.

“Good,” Roy said. He pressed his ear against the door and very gently raised the second pin tumbler.

“I am going to ask why you’re so damn slow at it,” Ed said.

Roy had to turn a lot further to eye him these days.

“What?” Ed said. “It’s a valid question. It’s just a good thing he doesn’t have neighbors.”

Roy was not going to rise to that, as much as one ever had to rise to anything that emanated from Ed’s mouth. Instead, he shifted the pick in deeper and gingerly nudged the next pin until he heard a very quiet _click_.

“I usually do this when I’m drunk,” he said. “I’m an intoxicated savant.”

Ed snorted. “Like I’d—”

Roy tapped the last tumbler, and this time the _click_ segued into a _clonk_. He paused, and then he tried the handle.

It turned.

“I’ll accept a heartfelt written apology for the character defamation another time,” he said. Getting up _again_ was even worse than the first time. Aging was a nightmare. He wanted a refund. “After you.”

“Thanks,” Ed said, which was weirdly sort of sweet. He sauntered through, sliding both hands into his pockets, and looked around the foyer. “So… based on structure from the outside—I’m willing to bet we’re looking at a secret attic instead of a secret basement. Guess that’s nice for a change.”

Roy stepped in and eased the door shut behind them, pocketing the lock picks that he almost hadn’t brought, as Ed crossed the rug ahead of them. “The ceiling does look low in here compared to the eaves.”

“There you go again,” Ed said, rocking back on his heels and rolling his eyes with more emphasis than it really merited. Looking at Ed’s beautiful eyes drew Roy’s gaze down over a beautiful cheekbone, up along a beautiful jaw, and then back along the seductive curve of a beautiful ponytail, which dropped him off over a beautiful shoulder, where… “Listen, I know they pay you to talk out your ass all the time, but—”

“Don’t move,” Roy said.

Ed wrinkled his nose. Which was also beautiful. Roy did not dare to breathe.

Ed rocked forward onto his toes again. His torso twisted; his weight tilted back. “What are you—”

He shifted one heel two centimeters backwards, scraping it across a curve of pale chalk just visible between the tassels of the rug beneath his feet.

The array lit up.

The house imploded.

  


* * *

  


Roy choked on what tasted like much more dust than air. He tried to winch his eye open; tried to move—

The light hadn’t changed too much. His right shoulder ached like _hell_ , but most of the rest of him had gone numb already. There was a half-shattered wooden beam laying across his body to pin him to the floor, but he barely felt it; it barely mattered; he was already looking out and up as he shoved it away and stumbled to his feet.

“Ed?” he said. There was something wrong with his voice; he coughed into his sleeve hard enough that his eyes watered. That didn’t matter either. The rubble was…

Backwards. He’d somehow been flung further inside; he was looking towards the door.

Something was wrong with his… balance? And the room; something was wrong with the angles of it; something…

Surely he could blame that on the self-evident fact that the suspicious ceiling had collapsed. A room of some type most certainly perched above, and the floor of it had dropped out and fallen on top of them. Roy squinted through the veil of dust—far too much like snow—around him everywhere, trying to force his heart to stop skittering as he crept forward. Any sign of movement. Anything. He could not, he _would_ not—

It wasn’t—possible. It simply wasn’t possible that Ed would have survived whatever horrors that that other world had flung at him, dragged himself back here, conceded after a _year_ of wheedling to take one tiny little risk—

Ed couldn’t die. He _couldn’t_. Yes, of course, if the world was fair, Roy wouldn’t have been drawing in another gritty breath in the first place, because he wouldn’t have been permitted most of the previous ones, but—

But Ed could not die. Ed would refuse on principle. Ed would not let something as petty as a collapsing building graze a single one of the glorious hairs upon his head.

Ed couldn’t die, because Roy couldn’t take it.

Not now. Not ever, but oh, _God_ , not now—not like this, not when everything had finally, _finally_ started to seem all right; not when he’d only just arrived; not when the amusement had only just started to warm up his eyes when Al made a joke. Not when he was _here_ ; when he was _back_ ; when he was living and breathing and gesturing more violently than was ever needed. Not when he was alive and home and settling slowly; not when the endless night had given way to sunrise, and sometimes Roy’s life felt like it had meaning—

Not now. Oh, _please_ , not now; not ever; let him carry on snarking and smirking and flicking that damned ponytail over his sharper, broader, gut-wrenchingly perfect shoulder until eternity burned out—

Roy almost didn’t hear the shuddering, half-voiced cough over the slamming of his heartbeat and the blizzard of screaming panic in his head.

A beam shifted; plaster dust puffed and then rained; he staggered forward and grabbed onto a chunk of roofing and hauled it aside, and—

Stood very, very still.

And looked at himself staring back up at him.

This—

It couldn’t—

Except—

His shoulder ached like hell.

He was looking at himself with two eyes.

He couldn’t feel his right hand.

“You have got,” his voice said, his mouth said, his _face_ said, “to be fucking kidding me.”

Roy swallowed another mouthful of plaster dust.

“Oh,” he said.

Giving himself a hand up—reaching out with his right hand on instinct; having the automail respond a minuscule fraction of a second later than he’d expected his nerve impulses to reach his fingers—proved remarkably surreal. Navigating an altered sense of balance while helping to haul his own body upright almost landed both of them on the floor. He tried swallowing again, and then tried flexing the automail fingers, and then tried staring up into his own face. None of those helped very much.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Are _you_ all right, you mean,” Ed-by-way-of-his-body said. Ed then wrinkled his nose—Roy’s nose. This was already a linguistic nightmare; Roy could barely imagine what it would be like when they reached the logistics. “You’re… fine. I think. Nothing feels broken. My back hurts. Your back.”

Roy felt like the entire world was collapsing this time, not just a deranged alchemist’s foyer. “Please don’t… say… things.”

“You first,” Ed-by-way-of-him said. “This is the creepiest shit I’ve ever seen.”

Roy watched in horror as his own eye lit up. There was plaster dust all over the eyepatch. Ed raised both hands, curled one into a fist, and smacked it into the opposite palm.

“ _Wait_ ,” Ed said. “Does this mean I have to impersonate you in your office until we figure this out? Oh, _man_. Do you know how much I’ve always wanted to do that? Suddenly this whole fucking situation is looking up.”

The single, solitary, paltry consolation was that, from here, Roy’s body looked really rather tall.

“Absolutely not,” Roy said. “I’ll be on leave until we sort this out. Which we will be begin doing _immediately_.”

“You’re no fun,” Ed said. He planted his hands on his hips and looked up through the hole in the ceiling. “What time is it?”

“You have my watch,” Roy said.

He wondered if he was dizzy from the alchemical transfer of consciousnesses, the concussion, or the sheer impossibility of watching his own face blink at him with so much of _Ed_ in it.

“Oh,” Ed said. “Yeah.” He reached into Roy’s left pocket first, frowned, and then tried the right. He extracted Roy’s pocket watch, which somehow didn’t appear to be too much worse for the wear, and opened it. “Huh. We haven’t been out long. That’s a good sign for our brains. I think. Plus we can probably still get some of his stuff.”

“ _You_ can get some of his stuff,” Roy said, picking his way through the rubble in the direction of what ought to be the kitchen in a moderately civilized home. He wasn’t confident that they were in one of those, obviously, but it was still worth a shot. “I’m going to call Lieutenant Hawkeye in _shame_ and beg her to—”

Hearing his own voice snicker made his spine tighten and forced him to turn.

“Are you sure?” Ed said, grinning at him like a demon.

Like a very, very handsome, gracefully-aging demon, certainly, but a demon all the same.

“Shut up,” Roy said.

That felt much more natural in this mouth.

Ed, in his form, in his clothes, wearing an almost-familiar smirk as a bonus, sauntered past him. The way that he was swinging Roy’s hips was nothing short of unjust. Possibly immoral. Definitely unfair. “Always wanted to do this. Move aside, peon; my business is more important than your petty little mind can begin to comprehend.”

“I do _not_ talk like that,” Roy said. “Have you looked at—”

“Yeah,” Ed said. It sounded so bizarre in Roy’s voice that he kept stopping in his tracks. His tracks felt… his tracks were strange. No sensation below the left thigh; the balance of his body, with a heavy weight high on the right and low on the left— “Shit,” Ed said. He’d taken an uneven step in the hall, so at least Roy wasn’t entirely alone in the awkward adjustment period. “Do you always compensate mathematically for the depth perception?”

“Yes,” Roy said. “Do you always have to build a tiny delay for the automail response into your reaction time?”

“Mostly,” Ed said. “It’s a little slower than it used to be. Europe beat the shit out of it. Winry can’t figure out what’s wrong. Might just be that my nerves are tired.”

Roy almost hesitated. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to find out.

But he had to, in some way. He needed to know.

“Are you always in this much pain?” he asked.

“Define ‘always’,” Ed said, turning through an open doorway. “It’s not quite as bad in fall and spring unless it’s raining, but winter’s pretty shit from start to finish.” A distant clattering sound greeted Roy from the doorway as he approached. “Found the phone. Dial tone—interesting. Figured he wouldn’t want to ruin his entire house if somebody broke in, but this guy’s _good_. What a pain in the ass. What’s the number?”

“Good luck,” Roy said. As delicately as possible when he still couldn’t quite get a handle on how to walk without wobbling—he was thinking about it too much; at the beginning, he’d moved on instinct, and he’d balanced himself more easily—he followed Ed into a pleasant little kitchen frosted with the white plaster dust that had permeated every inch of the damn building. Ed, using Roy’s gloved hands, had picked up the receiver and set one finger on the dialing wheel of the phone.

“You think I’m gonna fuck it up?” Ed asked.

Watching those words come out of his own mouth, in his own _voice_ , was so fascinating that Roy almost forgot to answer. “Not… exactly. You’ll see. We should call her directly.”

Ed muttered something disparaging about deliberately ambiguous bastards under Roy’s breath as he dialed.

When the line caught, Ed straightened his back, settled his shoulders, and crossed one foot over the other at the ankle. That was also fascinating, and probably a little bit insulting.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” Ed said, inserting an impressively subtle hint of a purr. “I’m afraid that there have been some… ah… complications, and… we’re going to need you to meet us at the house instead of at the rendezvous, much sooner than we… than we’d guessed.”

Roy smiled. It felt odd—not just the lack of the brush of the eyepatch every time that he shifted a muscle in his cheek. The arrangement of his features was different now.

After a moment’s pause, in which Ed used Roy’s face for some understandable confusion, Riza said, “Sir, are you… drunk?”

“ _What_?” Ed said. “ _No_ , I—” Roy motioned for the phone with the left hand, which he trusted more. “Damn it,” Ed said, handing it over. “Fine.”

Roy raised the receiver to his ear. “I am so sorry,” he said, “for the nightmares. There was an array on the floor, underneath a rug—blew a hole in the ceiling directly above itself, which may have destroyed some of the contents of the workshop, and likely would have blown a hole through us if we’d been standing any closer. As it is, I suspect that there was something to do with… reversal, possibly. He didn’t appear to be leaving for as long as we’d anticipated, so—”

“I get it,” Riza said, sounding like she’d been struck around the head with a crowbar. “You… this… you can fix it?”

“Well,” Roy said, “if Edward Elric can’t figure out how to undo it, this bastard _deserves_ to keep his State Alchemist certification.”

“Was that supposed to be a compliment?” Ed asked.

“I’m not sure,” Roy said.

“I give it a one out of five,” Ed said.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Riza said. “Please stop talking.”

Ed laughed—loud, harshly, and brightly, with Roy’s voice.

This was just _wrong_.

  


* * *

  


Watching himself do complicated constructive alchemy without a circle was equally wrong, although at least it had the advantage of being strangely engrossing.

The ladder constructed itself smoothly from the appropriated floorboards, surging upwards elegantly to secure itself against the rim of the jagged hole in the ceiling. Squinting with Ed’s two serviceable eyes, Roy could see transmutation marks slithering across the planks at the edge—shoring them up, presumably, so that whoever topped the ladder wouldn’t plunge immediately through the makeshift floor. That spoke to a level of caution that Edward ‘Live Fast, Improvise Faster’ Elric simply hadn’t possessed in the era before.

He might have learned it in the intervening years, if he’d stayed—if he’d had half a chance to grow up at something like an ordinary speed. Ed had never done much of anything at an ordinary speed, but perhaps he could have, if…

If he’d only been here. If there’d only been time. If he hadn’t come back a stranger.

But the natural conclusion was that the world, the _other_ world, had trained him to plan at least a step ahead, instead of believing that he could jump the gap any time a piece was missing. At least that part made sense.

The deep, deep weariness with which Ed was looking at his handiwork made much less.

Roy hesitated again, but in the end—in the grander scheme of his petty life—he’d never had a choice. Delaying the inevitable never changed its shape. “Is… something wrong?”

“Nah,” Ed said. His borrowed eye flicked out over the warped wood extending towards the ceiling, striated with those geometric marks like a second overlying grain. “Just… from what I hear, you’re already thinking about it kinda like this, but don’t… waste… transmutations. Make ’em count. You don’t want to know much more than that. Trust me.”

It seemed more difficult, in this body, for Roy to bite his tongue. Was there any possibility that that could have something to do with genetic makeup, or hormonal balance, or age or brain configuration or—

“I do,” he said. “Trust you.”

The way that Ed looked at him—the needlingly particular combination of surprise and mistrust—would have made his skin crawl even if it hadn’t been like gazing into a distorted mirror.

Roy stepped past Ed and put his hands on the closest rung of the ladder. Despite the weight of the automail, he couldn’t imagine that this body was heavier than his; it only made sense for him to climb up first.

That excuse would have sounded much more plausible if he’d believed for an instant that there could be anything flawed in Ed’s construction.

It didn’t much matter, though. The arch “Coming?” left his mouth easily, and both hands curled quick and tight around the rungs as he moved up. Ed’s body wanted to be in motion; wanted to be actively fighting the status quo. It wanted to be a force of nature, even if the force in question was entropy.

Roy clambered over the edge carefully when he reached the top. Ed was the most brilliant alchemist that the world had ever seen and then lost and then seen again, yes, but he wasn’t an architect, and it was better to risk offending him than to hurl his corporeal form down ten feet onto a pile of broken beams to prove a point.

Craig Kellvern was living up to his reputation more by the minute: the array that had collapsed the ceiling had spared all of his shelves, books, tables, and _glassware_ as well as the telephone line.

Roy skirted the edge of the cavernous hole in the now-no-longer-a-ceiling-but-a-floor and proceeded over to one of the bookshelves. He had more experience than he would have liked with analyzing the psychology of rural hermit rogue alchemists, and usually they kept their secrets in the knowledge vaults.

He could hear that Ed had topped the ladder behind him, although having the sound of his own voice confirm it made him want to cringe. “Hey. Keep an eye out for notes. It’s always the notes.”

“I know,” Roy said. He reached for a promisingly weathered, arcane-looking tome on one of the shelves.

His hand… couldn’t… extend that far. His fingers didn’t make it. He could barely graze the tips against the edge of the shelf, let alone touch the book, let alone gain enough traction against its spine to draw it out and pull it down.

He lowered his arm, staring up at the impassable chasm that the loss of six inches had carved out ahead of him.

“Good Lord,” he said.

“Less whining,” Ed said, “more winning. What?”

Roy looked him in the eye and raised Ed’s left arm again. He wriggled the fingers for emphasis.

“I feel,” he said, “shortchanged.”

Ed managed to make Roy’s own eye go from idly curious to completely disaffected in the span of an instant.

“I’ve been given short shrift,” Roy said. He pushed himself up onto his tiptoes for good measure. It wasn’t only the reduced height from which he was reaching; the arm itself was shorter, which resulted in a poignant double dose of indignity. “The short end of the stick. Life is so—”

“If you think having a building fall on you hurts,” Ed said, “keep talkin’.”

“I think I need a stepstool,” Roy said. “Or at least a box. You could carry a box with you for times like this.” He gave up on his first target and set his eyes on an equally mysterious-looking book on a more accessible shelf. This one had several scraps of paper protruding from the top, which were likely either notes or an improbable number of bookmarks. He managed to catch the top of the spine with a fingertip and tilt it towards himself. “Honestly, shoes with a platform heel might do; you only need—”

The book dropped, but when he raised his right hand to catch it, it slid heedlessly against the metal, tumbled, and—

 _Slammed_ one corner directly onto the toes of his right foot.

He stood very, very still for a long second, eyes squeezed shut, concentrating his willpower on suppressing all of the unseemly things that he wanted to say.

“Oh,” Ed said, so mercilessly deadpan that Roy’s borrowed eyes snapped open in spite of him. “You should watch out for the loss of friction with the automail. Might take you by surprise.”

Roy gritted Ed’s teeth. Did that feel fractionally different, or was he overanalyzing now?

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s _very_ helpful. So kind.”

Ed didn’t even bother to keep the smirk off of Roy’s face, which Roy supposed was… something like fair. “I try.”

“You’re going to be the one dealing with a broken toe,” Roy said.

“It’s not broken,” Ed said, calmly pulling one of the books down from a shelf near Kellvern’s desk. “Takes a heavier book and a bigger distance. You gonna read that, or what?”

What Roy _wanted_ to do was to throw the book at Ed’s head, but since the head that Ed was currently using actually belonged to him, that was almost certainly what _Ed_ wanted. Roy’s borrowed toes hurt. He also wasn’t positive that he would actually make contact with the book if he flung it, since he’d have to use his left hand, and there was nothing in the vast world more tragic than lobbing a retaliatory projectile only to _miss_.

He also wasn’t entirely sure how much of the book-hurling impulse really belonged to him. Was that a physiological echo of Ed’s temper? Was it an exaggerated reflection of his?

He tried to give Ed a glare that would convey at least a few of those emotions, but it was surprisingly difficult to glare at _himself_.

Did he really look that—tired? He looked tired. It wasn’t the type of tired that made him look _older_ , precisely; it was just the type that made him look… defeated.

Despite the many, many volumes of whining and moaning that he’d dedicated to gray hairs and crow’s feet over the years, he was struck with the conviction that this was worse.

He picked up the book.

Three scribbled note pages in, he stopped—short, one might still say, but there wasn’t time for it just now; he’d have to save that one for later.

The point was that he _could_.

He was absorbing information at a vastly accelerated rate; he could _feel_ himself retaining it—

“Ed,” he said. “You need to be careful.”

“I tried to make that my legal middle name,” Ed said without looking up from flipping through some blueprints. “Got all the way to the courthouse, paperwork in hand, but then Al tackled me on the stairs and said—”

“I mean it,” Roy said.

Ed glanced up.

“The eye,” Roy said. He had to calculate the quickest way to convey all of the necessary details, and it was so damn _easy_ that a part of him wanted to sit down on the floor and weep. “It was Archer. The bullet passed through my brain, and it nicked a couple of things. Fortunately, as I’m sure you’ve already thanked your lucky stars for, it spared my scintillating personality, but my… there’s been a substantial amount of memory loss. We’ve apparently exchanged physiologies entirely, so you… you’ll forget things. Lose them. Not too much, and not too often, but enough that it… well. You should be prepared for it. That’s all.”

Ed looked at him for a long moment—long enough that Roy understood a lot of old things anew again. His face’s expression, even with Ed’s psyche behind it, was utterly, entirely, abjectly inscrutable. It was so blank that it looked curdlingly cold.

“Huh,” Ed said. “So… what you’re saying is…” He tapped Roy’s fingers on the edge of the table. “If I want to keep track of all the ways that I’m gonna kick your ass when this is over, I should write a list.”

Roy smiled, in spite of himself this time. It felt as strange with Ed’s face as he imagined that it would have with his own. Evidently neither of them smiled enough. “That’s certainly… that… works.”

“Good,” Ed said. He rolled up the blueprints and smacked them against his open palm, eye flicking over the table again. He tucked the roll under his arm, shifted some glassware, and drew out a piece of paper that had resided underneath. “Guess I should just take all this stuff instead of trying to memorize it, but that’s fine. I like stealing from assholes.” He tucked the new paper in with the blueprints and started raiding one of the shelves again. “You find anything good? We can always just… take him into custody based on the fact that he tried to kill us, and then come back later.”

“I’m not confident that the law would be on our side,” Roy said, “considering the breaking and entering involved.”

Ed shrugged, flipping a book open. “You always made that stuff work after the fact for me.”

“Exactly,” Roy said. “Do you think that I have an unlimited supply of retellings of the truth and redeemable favors?”

“Yeah,” Ed said without looking up from the page. “You’re Roy Mustang.”

That—

Was not a mess that Roy could afford to untangle just now. It didn’t matter what that was; it didn’t matter what it sounded like.

“Actually,” Roy said, “at the moment, _you_ are.”

Ed half-smiled—still without looking up. “Message received. You’re crap at the research part. Why don’t you go downstairs and diagram out his array so that we have a hope in hell of undoing this later, before I redeem all your precious favors while your back’s turned?”

The word _No_ rose to Roy’s mouth so suddenly that he only barely caught it behind his teeth. Was it possible that impulsiveness could be ingrained? It did sometimes seem contagious, but he’d never considered it innate. Either Ed’s body was attempting to prove otherwise, or he’d hit his head harder than he’d thought, or…

Well. Or Edward Elric brought out the flash and the fire in him that he’d believed, for many years, had died in Ishval with the rest of his humanity.

“That is,” he said, measuredly, “a very rational suggestion.”

He collected a few blank sheets of paper and a pencil, and then proceeded over to the ladder, where he carefully fixed the automail hand around the top rung before he extended his right foot.

“Awesome,” Ed said. He was already halfway into the book; distraction sounded strange in Roy’s voice. Roy’s _voice_ sounded strange; it was ever so slightly different than the way he heard it in his head. He’d listened to recordings of himself a handful of times, but this was much more… immediate. And odder by a power of ten. “I’ll catch you up.”

Momentarily, Roy was faced with the unenviable task of clearing rubble, followed by the unenviable task of rolling up an enormous rug without stepping on any of the intricate chalk lines laid out beneath it. It was unlikely that this array would have a second colossal burst of energy left in it—especially given that he didn’t know if the switching of consciousnesses had been an _intentional_ side effect. If it wasn’t, the expenditure required must have been astronomical, but this whole damn situation was so unlikely that he wasn’t quite ready to rule it out.

Once he’d shifted enough of the detritus to be able to see the structure of the thing, copying it was tedious but manageable work. The sheer complicatedness of the damn circle might give Ed some pause—Roy was picking out sigils and toying with theoretical connections idly as he went along, but he hadn’t come up with anything concrete. He couldn’t imagine that it would take Ed too terribly long, though. He couldn’t imagine that there was anything that Ed, older and cleverer and sharper at the edges than he’d ever been, could _not_ accomplish once he’d set his mind to do it.

Moments after Roy had checked and re-checked to make sure that he’d accurately portrayed even the lines that had been smudged by the small matter of the ceiling falling in, he heard the floorboards above creak softly, and then Ed was descending the ladder with an impressive collection of papers underneath his arm.

Roy stood up, which made less of a difference than it felt like it ought to, which was another gem that he was planning to share with Ed later. “Did you find enough?”

“Dunno yet,” Ed said. “Doesn’t matter. We can come back.” Roy was still staring at him by the time he stepped down off of the ladder and turned around. “What?”

“I’m aware that you’re a genius alchemist and so on and so forth,” Roy said, “but do you _really_ think that you can repair this entire room and eradicate all of the dust well enough that he won’t even know we were _here_?”

“Don’t have to,” Ed said. He crossed directly to Roy, expression so blank—so close to bored—that Roy had to fight the impulse to step back. It was a good thing that he did, since Ed unceremoniously shoved the pile of papers and blueprints into his arms. “Just gonna fix the front of it, so that he falls into our trap.”

Perhaps another part of the ceiling had landed on Roy’s head, and he simply hadn’t noticed. “Our… trap?”

Ed was stealing his swagger and using it for _unnatural_ purposes. There probably wasn’t a law against it, considering, but Roy fully intended to enact one as soon as possible. “Watch and learn, Mustang.”

  


* * *

  


Roy watched. And he learned that apparently reconstructing the front of a farmhouse could be the work of a single transmutation without a circle, if one was a genius alchemist and so on and so forth; and also that apparently a trap could be the work of a considerable ditch alchemically dug out of the middle of the road leading back up to the house.

“We can cover it with corn stalks,” Ed said.

Roy was standing a safe distance away holding all of the papers that they’d collected, which was much less reassuring when _his_ body was the one conducting all of the wild alchemy. “Why can’t you just transmute it?”

“Because that’s lazy as _fuck_ ,” Ed said, planting Roy’s hands on Roy’s hips. “The other stuff we wouldn’t’ve had time to do the hard way. This one we can.”

“It’s not lazy,” Roy said. “It’s an efficient allocation of effort.” 

Ed used _his_ hands to start hauling on the nearest stalk of corn. “Are you gonna help, or what?”

“Absolutely not,” Roy said.

  


* * *

  


Half an hour later, the sun set on the pair of them tussling with corn. Roy felt like a yokel. At least, he assumed that he felt like a yokel; he’d never been a yokel, and he now had even less of an intention ever to start.

Half an hour after that, they’d succeeded in covering about three-quarters of the ditch, and Roy caught sight of headlights. They were set too high above the ground to be a town car.

“That’s not Lieutenant Hawkeye,” he said.

“Shit,” Ed said. “Okay, time’s up.”

He clapped his hands— _Roy’s_ hands—together briskly, and the energy crackled blue-white, and before Roy could even blink the afterimages out of his eyes, Ed had grabbed his sleeve and hauled him backwards into the corn.

In the house, he had most certainly determined that Kellvern was extremely smart. Usually, a sense of suspicion and a keen eye for observation—literally _an_ eye, in some cases—came along with that. Roy supposed, though, that if Kellvern spotted the ruse, stopped the truck, and put it in reverse, Ed would be fast enough on Roy’s legs to catch him and find some other efficient allocations of effort to apply to the situation.

That shouldn’t have been quite so comforting.

“This is,” Roy said as the truck rumbled closer, “the most bizarre stakeout—”

“And the most interesting,” Ed said. “Hey, where’d you leave our stuff?”

“In a mud puddle,” Roy said. “What do you think? It’s out of the way. You didn’t exactly give me time to—”

“Your _priorities_.” It was more of a groan with syllables than a statement. “Have you ever in your _life—_ ”

A crashing sound, immediately followed by the roar of an engine and a significantly larger crashing sound, accompanied by what sounded like a man yelling “ _Fuck_!”, heralded the unexpected success of the unconventional trap.

“Oh,” Ed said. He parted stalks of corn with both hands—both of Roy’s hands. “Cool.”

  


* * *

  


The next set of headlights, which appeared on the horizon approximately half an hour after that, definitely did belong to a town car. These headlights found them sitting on top of the cab of the downed truck, in which their trussed-up quarry sat fuming and swearing and talking about his rights. He had a loftily naïve misconception of their government’s respect for individual citizens, which made Roy sad in a distant sort of way. Roy had retrieved all of their documents. Roy had missed Ed so much that beginning to acknowledge it in the face of this reunion felt like a cave-in.

“We probably shouldn’t talk much,” Roy said.

Ed kicked a foot out into the open air and then let his heel bang against the back of the cab. Kellvern swore a little louder. “In front of the culprit, you mean?”

“Yes,” Roy said. “He’d probably use the opportunity to gloat, whether or not this was even deliberate. He tried swinging Ed’s foot. The heel of the left one banged on the back of the cab so loudly that Kellvern coined several new words. “We’re also less likely to give Lieutenant Hawkeye a heart condition if we keep our mouths shut.”

“Sold,” Ed said.

  


* * *

  


It was a very long, very silent drive back to Central Command. It would have been longer if Riza had demonstrated a modicum of respect for the speed limit. Roy, at least, appreciated her lawlessness very much.

She left them in the car—Ed, resembling Roy, in the backseat where he’d been guarding their captive; Roy, resembling Ed, in the passenger seat—as she went to go deposit their prisoner in an appropriate cell until she could process the evidence that they’d procured.

“So,” Ed said. “Heard any good jokes lately?”

Roy turned to look at him. It was still surprising him that he didn’t have to turn very far. “Has that ever worked before?”

“Gets people to talk,” Ed said, “which is the real purpose, so… yeah.”

Roy eyed him for a second and then looked out the windshield at the road. The rest of the city kept moving—little rushes; idle patter. An infinite number of overlapping circles as people left their homes, fulfilled their business, and returned.

“Havoc told one the other day,” he said. He folded his arms and drew a breath. The automail was so damn heavy. “So… a man cheats on his taxes. He’s desperate and doesn’t have a choice, but he isn’t brilliant, so he doesn’t do a particularly subtle job of it. Two days after he submits them, there’s an officer of the military banging on his door.”

“Hmm,” Ed said.

“The officer says, ‘Sir, you need to let me in’,” Roy said. “The man’s panicking, of course, thinking he’s about to spend the rest of his miserable life in prison, but he says, ‘Well, what do you need?’ and tries to sound innocent. The officer says, ‘Your help.’ The man starts looking for weapons, or for a way to barricade the door, or for someplace to run. He says, ‘With what? I can’t help you.’” Roy was tempted to put his feet up on the dashboard, but Riza would murder him in cold blood, no matter whose blood it was at the moment. “The officer says, ‘Yes, you can. With my taxes. What’s your hourly rate?’”

Ed was silent for a second.

Then he snickered.

“Sounds about right,” he said.

  


* * *

  


“I’ll put in for a sick day for you tomorrow,” Riza said as she drove them towards Roy’s house. Roy had to admit that it was an appropriate use of one; he’d rarely felt more ‘indisposed to complete requisite duties in service of the state’, so by the standards of the form header, he was a perfect fit. “I’ll bring some of the files over tomorrow afternoon so that you don’t get too far behind.”

“As always,” Roy said, “you’re too kind.”

At least it was Thursday. And at least he could enjoy the bizarre satisfaction of watching her fight very, _very_ hard with a horrified expression every time she heard him speak.

Roy and Ed had agreed—in keeping with a rather loose interpretation of the word—that Roy’s house was a better venue for their attempts to counteract the array, because Ed reporting to Roy’s residence for work-related causes was marginally more plausible than Roy loitering around the Elric brothers’ apartment. There were also factors such as the greater overall square footage; Roy’s extensive personal library; the fact that Roy didn’t have a brother or a roommate, let alone both in one; and the additional minor detail that his neighbors could not hear him through the walls.

They were all good arguments, and Roy had made them because he believed them.

But now, as they drove—now, with the adrenaline fading—the thought of Ed strolling into his home set him on edge.

It mattered too much—he _cared_ too much.

Ed was about to see his inner sanctum.

Ed was about to inhabit it with him, right up until they somehow sorted this out.

It was the first time in his life that Roy had wished that Riza drove a hell of a lot slower.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, we are back, and I have raised the rating! I have no idea yet if there is going to be anything properly explicit later (stay tuned as I desperately attempt to gain control of my careening life), but I found out the hard way that you can't write awkward naked scenes without talking about the naked part in enough detail that the M seemed safer. X'D The next such scene is betterworse than this one.
> 
> This fic is, of course, spiraling wildly, so I have no idea how long it's going to be. :') ~~Fucking Shamballa 'verse I swear to GOD~~ Everything is fine! I'm almost 60K in now. It's fine. Yeah. Fine. X'D
> 
> I also really meant to get to the comments on the last chapter, since they were especially lovely and made me really happy! I'm still holding out a little hope that I'll go back to them, so if I do, please forgive super late replies. ♥
> 
> While you're here and suffering with me, though, applications for the Equivalent Exchange Anthology project are opening REAL SOON(!). Like, POSSIBLY BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS(!). Check [Tumblr](https://equivalentexchangeanthology.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/EE_Anthology) on February 1st – we are accepting all kinds of contributors! :D

They made it a whole three steps into Roy’s entryway—well, Ed did; Roy was locking the deadbolts—before Ed said, “I need to call Al.”

In the olden days, Roy could have said _It’s ten at night_ , or _It’s not like he doesn’t know that you were on a stakeout that was originally meant to last a long time_ , or _Doesn’t he have his own life?_

Now…

The Elrics still bickered and bantered and teased as much as they ever had, but it was softer at the edges. They stuck physically closer to each other than they’d used to. It did not take a genius of their own caliber to understand that the things that they’d been though—here, first; and then in the other place—had made them more terrified than ever to lose each other.

“Give me five minutes,” Roy said, starting for the stairs. He reached out to flip the light-switch and realized that he had to raise his hand a couple inches. “I’m sick of being covered in dust. And I’m sick of looking at _you_ letting _me_ be covered in dust. Come on.”

“Is it the prissiness the girls are attracted to?” Ed asked. “Or the bossiness?”

“Hurry up,” Roy said. The weight of the automail was slowing his steps, but Ed’s other knee was marginally less weary than the one that he was used to, so overall it more or less evened out. “Or you’ll miss all the fun of me discovering that you don’t fit any of my clothes.”

Ed’s footsteps on the stairs made him smirk. It was unfair, but life was, and he had to get his hands on the reins of this one before it flung him into a ditch.

“I’m gonna throw myself out a window,” Ed said. “Break every lousy bone in your lousy body.”

“Careful at the top,” Roy said. “And when we go back down. Binocular vision is much better with those.”

“I’m so glad that your damn gift for extremely selective hearing wasn’t affected by this whole thing. What a relief.”

“Me, too,” Roy said, stepping into the bedroom.

He flicked the lights on and took a quick survey, even though there wasn’t time to fix any of it now. He had, wisely, abstained from ever painting out _To hell with everything, I have been in love with Edward Elric for so long that I’m entirely ruined for other people_ on a canvas and hanging it on the wall. He’d thought about commissioning it from someone with better handwriting.

Ed stopped in the doorway beside him, the better to stare at the haphazard mountain of shirts draped on top of the laundry basket, in various stages of wrinkling their way out of their disgraceful existence. “Jesus, Mustang. Do you _ever_ do laundry?”

“Of course not,” Roy said, sweeping past him—which was, for the record, much harder to do with someone else’s rather less extensive legs. “I extract the dirt from all of my clothes with alchemy, and collect it until I’ve formed little clods that I can throw at my neighbors.”

At least Ed was now staring at him, instead of at the basket-mound of shame.

Then Ed started laughing, and then Ed pushed a hand back through his hair—Roy’s hair—and said, “ _Damn_ it. I owe Al money. He said you were going to get more sarcastic over time, and I said it wasn’t humanly possible. Hey, does a bet get voided if the currency that you made it in doesn’t exist in the universe you’re currently inhabiting?”

“I refused to study philosophy for a reason,” Roy said, pulling open the dresser. “From the perspective of a politician who specializes in technicalities, since the promised money _can’t_ exchange hands, I’d say the bet is off. From the perspective of a person who wins most of the bets he makes… pay your brother, Ed.”

“Thought you might say that,” Ed said.

Roy was very, very tempted to throw a clean pair of trousers at Ed’s head—knowing full well that it would be unexpected, and that Ed was still adapting to the loss of stereopsis, and that it would almost certainly hit Ed in the face.

That was, Roy’s face.

He still wanted to do it.

The strangest part wasn’t even the impulse itself; it was the fact that there wasn’t any malice behind it. He didn’t want the zipper on the fly or the button to smack Ed in the eye; he didn’t even particularly want to shut Ed up. More than anything else, it felt like he wanted… attention?

He curled his left hand around the edge of the drawer and looked thoughtfully at the veins in the back of his hand. He felt a little… not _giddy_ , precisely, but… a strange sort of alertness with an excitement built in. As if he was on his guard, but thrilled about it. As if his blood was running a little too hot and a little too fast—but that could just have been physiological; Ed’s circulatory system didn’t cover quite as much ground. As if…

“Mustang,” Ed said. “I know you like napping in the middle of important shit, but falling asleep standing up is pretty intense even for you. If you pass out in my body and land me with another damn concussion—”

Roy realized, with a streak of horror a half-mile wide, that his regular voice simply lent itself to long-winded scolding, and it was annoying as _hell_.

So, so much of his life was suddenly starting to make sense.

“Hush,” he said.

“So you can sleep?” Ed said. “Nice try.”

Roy finally grabbed a pair of trousers out of the drawer, which he stormed over to Ed to shove at him. “Shirts are in the closet behind you. Pick a color that you like.”

Ed had not moved except to accept—more or less—the pants; Roy stalked back over to the dresser and extracted a sweatshirt and a pair of pajama bottoms. If this nightmare of a day was destined to continue, he intended to endure it as comfortably as possible.

Undoing buttons with only one set of fingers was not a task that he was particularly eager to repeat. He’d done up enough shirts while trying to chug the cup of coffee in his other hand that it wasn’t quite as challenging as it could have been, at least.

Ed was still standing there holding the replacement trousers in both hands, watching Roy with an expression closer to a cringe than anything else. “Uh—”

“You’re wearing an undershirt,” Roy said. “So am I.” He wasn’t sure which corporeal forms those pronouns best applied to anymore, but at least the statement was true in either direction. “You want to get this over with and call your brother, don’t you?”

Ed gritted Roy’s teeth. Roy was going to slap him with a bill for the dental work. He needed to keep a tab. “I mean—yeah, but—”

“It’s _business_ , Ed,” Roy said. “I’m not going to track dust all over my own house and sit around caked in it for the sake of your…”

_Modesty_? No. _Reservations_? Worse.

He was standing in front of the dresser in his bedroom, wearing someone else’s skin, with Ed’s absolutely _damnable_ waistcoat wide open and Ed’s shirt unbuttoned most of the way down. There was an undershirt beneath it. There was also underwear; he would most _certainly_ have noticed otherwise what with all of the clambering up and down alchemically-constructed ladders, let alone…

Let alone the way that Ed was fingering the top button of Roy’s shirt like it was utterly forbidden, and watching him with a gut-wrenching sort of suspicion.

Roy took a deep breath. He had been in love with Edward Elric for so long that it had entirely ruined him for other people, and apparently also for using his damn brain.

This was Ed. Ed was utterly open and overconfident when he was in his element; Ed had an ego to rival Roy’s when he had both feet planted firmly on familiar ground and a point to make.

But even the Ed that had come back the first time had been different from the tireless, feckless, unapologetically brazen little prodigy that had seared himself across all of their memories. The red coat was gone. So was the fury, and the fire, and the faith. The world had betrayed Edward Elric one too many times—and then at least a dozen more. The Ed that Roy had found standing on that platform had had all of the steel and none of the spark. That Ed had been alive for Al—alive for one last chance to see him; for one single moment to make sure that he was whole. That Ed had known what he was giving up in the exchange.

This Ed—the one that Roy was currently occupying like a foreign state; the one with aching automail and a sick amusement at the state of things that reminded Roy far too much of himself—looked stabler by far. He smiled, and it often reached his eyes; he joked; he laughed; he argued. He hoisted all the flags and polished all the signposts. He checked the boxes—every single one of them, when he had an audience. When he was in front of others, he played happiness and gratitude and satisfaction like he’d been born into the role.

Roy remembered. He remembered how bone-chillingly, blood-poundingly urgent it felt—the compulsion to convince people that everything was fine. Remembered almost being able to make himself believe that if he fooled them, he could fool himself.

If Ed wasn’t prepared to watch Roy undress him under these indescribably bizarre circumstances, then he wasn’t. The pain did not play favorites. The spikes of screaming terror did not make sense.

Roy remembered.

It was easy to. It still came up behind him and covered his eye and laughed in his ear when he faltered.

“All right,” Roy said. “Why don’t you turn the lights off? Although that _is_ going to make it a lot more difficult for you to find a shirt that clashes unconscionably with those pants.”

“Damn,” Ed said, with only the _slightest_ hint of relief seeping through into Roy’s voice. “You foiled my evil master plan.” He reached for the switch, missed it, scrunched up _Roy’s face_ , and then batted the switch down on his second try and dropped them both into darkness. “How are my odds if I just grab one out at random?”

“Exceedingly poor,” Roy said. He felt around in the dark for the last buttons on Ed’s shirt and tried very, very hard not to think too much about everything underneath it. “Most of them are white.”

“You have any ink lying around that you don’t want anymore?” Ed asked. “Preferably in a weird color. Or, wait—what’s for dinner?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Roy said.

Roy was not, was not, was _not_ , was not letting himself dwell on the fact that he was opening the fly of Ed’s pants. He was not thinking about the way that he’d settled his hands on Ed’s sides to push them down; was not thinking about the way the hipbone felt beneath his left hand—and the skin, and Ed’s thigh, and…

He stepped out of Ed’s pants. He peeled Ed’s shirt off of his shoulders, which required some finagling to disentangle it from the automail. The shirt grazed his bare back on its fluttering journey to the floor. He shivered. That felt so _strange_ in a borrowed body—all of this did, but even in the safety of this near-pitch black, broken by the faintest glow of city lights reflected off the clouds—

This was… intimate.

Ed had been right to try to back away. This was more than Roy was ready for, and he’d just tried to dive in headfirst, with his eyes wide open. _Both_ eyes. What a damn novelty that was.

The automail made him even clumsier when he couldn’t see what his hand was doing; his brain kept questioning the idea that it was obeying him at all. He managed to drag the sweatshirt on over his head—Ed’s hair would be a frizzy, puffy mess until he patted it down; it would be _adorable_ , and he couldn’t afford it—and then wrangled himself into the pajama pants. That was yet another challenge of coordination that he hadn’t trained for; he couldn’t tell if his right hand was gripping anything, and he couldn’t tell if his left foot was through the leg hole and planted on the carpet, or caught up halfway through the fabric somewhere, or…

A hanger rattled.

“Are you done?” Ed asked.

“Possibly,” Roy said.

“Hold on,” Ed said. “I really, really want you to explain to me how you can be ‘ _possibly_ ’ dressed. Go on. I live for bullshit metaphysics.”

“Are any of us really dressed?” Roy said. He hauled on the drawstring with his left hand and attempted to loop it into something like a slipknot. “We’re all lost souls drifting in the night like so many will-o’-the-wisps, and clothing is just a very flimsy form of armor, which all of us are using to try to project some image of a person we might never… go ahead and hit the light.”

“Jesus,” Ed said. “You’re good at this game.”

He turned the lights back on.

Roy looked down and discovered the fabric of his familiar pajama pants pooling on the floor around his unfamiliar feet.

“Ah,” he said. “Well.”

“Shut up,” Ed said.

Roy bit back a grin. Just having one to fight with felt good; he could hardly imagine… “All I said was ‘Well’.”

“You were thinking a whole lot more than that,” Ed said.

Roy bit down harder. “I was thinking it very quietly.”

“You think like a whole damn orchestra,” Ed said, turning towards the door too fast to notice that Roy no longer had even a fraction of a grin to deal with. “The kind with cannons.”

In a strange way, Roy was not sure he’d ever received a better compliment.

  


* * *

  


By the time Roy had dealt with the issue of, depending on who you asked, either too-long-pants or too-short-legs, Ed was halfway down the stairs. Ed paused on the second-to-last step, set one hand on the banister, and carefully extended his foot down to the next one.

Roy was not sure how to say _Wait, did you actually_ listen _to me?_ in a way that would not encourage Ed to miss it on purpose and hurl Roy’s fragile body to the hardwood next time.

“This part’s easy,” Ed said. “Used to go up and down the stairs in Munich in the dark all the time. Drunk. It’s not too different from that.”

Roy didn’t move. Occasions where Ed offered that much specificity about anything to do with the other place, let alone unprompted—

But Ed was already crossing the foyer to the phone, and Roy had to concentrate on balancing himself if he wanted to follow.

He’d just come up beside Ed—Ed as himself, which… the angles were so _strange_ ; and his hair was an absolute mess, and Ed did not seem to be distressed about it in the slightest—when the ringing line caught.

“Al,” Ed said, clutching the phone much more tightly with the left hand than the right, “don’t panic.”

There was a pause.

And then Alphonse Elric, the epitome of kindness and upstanding moral character and all of the other tripe that people who didn’t really know him attributed to his smiling babyface and strong convictions, started laughing uproariously.

“You can’t come over,” Ed said. “Those are the rules.”

“Are you _kidding_?” Al said. “Like hell am I gonna miss this. I’m going to leave as soon as you hang up the phone. Make him say something, Brother. C’mon.”

Ed waved an unnecessary but very urgent hand in Roy’s direction. For better or worse, they were in this together. “It’s ten o’clock at night! You’re not going anywhere. You can—you can come by tomorrow.”

“You might’ve fixed it by then,” Al said. “Besides, I can bring some of your clothes. It won’t be very fun for General Mustang to be rolling his own trouser legs up four times.”

There was a pause. Ed eyed Roy expectantly. Roy shrugged, which hurt because of the way the automail was aching.

“Maybe three and a half,” he said.

“ _Tomorrow_ ,” Ed said. “Odds of us fixing it tonight are piss-poor anyway, since I’m pretty sure the guy didn’t even intend it to do this; I think he just wanted to drop the house on anybody who fucked around in it. So we have to figure out exactly how he designed the house-dropping array on purpose, and then _remove_ that and see what lines we’ve got left and which ones could’ve accidentally fucking reversed the consciousnesses in two stupid assholes, and—”

Al was laughing again.

“General,” he said. “Please, _please_ say something—some word Ed wouldn’t; something with a ton of syllables and lots of silent letters. He hates those.”

Ed was scowling at the phone with Roy’s face, and Roy reached out with Ed’s hand to take the receiver.

“Have a lovely evening, Alphonse,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Ed looked at it for a moment. Roy’s face _did_ do contemplation very well. “He deserved that.”

“He did,” Roy said.

Ed shoved his hands into the pockets of Roy’s clean trousers. He curled his right hand—he would be unused to it feeling cold, wouldn’t he? He’d picked a white shirt in the darkness after all; Roy supposed that that was an ill omen for their work tonight. He might have guessed as much: Ed had always had legendarily bad luck. _Havoc_ had robbed him blind at poker once, when Ed had been around fifteen, although Ed’s facial expressions hadn’t helped him in the slightest as the deck threw him repeatedly to the ground. At least it had only taken Al about ten minutes to win it all back.

“So,” Ed said. “What are we eating?”

Roy went into his own damn kitchen and panned his gaze across it slowly enough that he could stare at everything. It all looked different. He was discovering the undersides of the upper cabinets; all of the proportions seemed wrong.

“Only the finest of gourmet cuisine,” he said.

“Let me guess,” Ed said, coming up behind him, and even in a world that was upside-down and fundamentally backwards, the proximity froze him where he stood. “Something out of a can.”

“Such derision,” Roy said. He could move; he knew that he could move; he knew that he could step forward, and then forward again, and approach his own damn pantry, and Edward Elric would not disappear. He crossed to the cabinet; put his left hand on the knob. “Unfortunately, unless you’d like to pop out and see what’s open at this hour, it’s the best suggestion that I’ve got.”

“Wasn’t criticizing,” Ed said. Roy opened it and turned to look at him in the same motion; he draped Roy’s body over one of the kitchen chairs with such ease that the indolence looked like art. “I just came off a couple years of rations and bread lines and all that shit.” Roy had no idea what their options were for soup, because he couldn’t look away from the distance in his own eye—the length of a gap between universes; a void like the space between stars. “Sometimes I wanna fucking cry in the mornings when Al just says ‘There’s coffee’ like it’s something I should take for granted. We both fucking _did_ cry the first time Gracia had us over, with the pie and all.”

“Her cooking has that effect on a lot of people,” Roy said. “I’m afraid that even the pinnacle of my collection of canned goods likely won’t live up to that.”

“Damn it,” Ed said—wistfully, and the gentleness of that sounded so strange in Roy’s voice that he could barely imagine hearing it in Ed’s. “You should’ve said _that_ to Al. He would’ve peed himself.”

Roy tried not to smile. It was dangerously simple to still his face—after all of the other impulses that had increased in intensity, to find suppressing this one so easy… “Is that the prescripted punishment for making fun of us?”

Ed leaned back in the chair, left arm slung over the back, and drummed the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop, looking slightly surprised at the sound. “Should’ve said that, too.”

The thought reached Roy like an avalanche—just a rumble of a warning before it bowled him over and buried him.

This moment was the mirror image of one of his pathetic fantasies.

Ed, in his kitchen—wearing his _clothes_ —familiar enough to reach for things on instinct; him, lounging, watching, commentating, in his shirtsleeves and unironed slacks, comfortable enough to tilt his head back and leave his throat bare. They both looked at-home, and they were both looking at each other—an insipid domestic daydream brought to life.

As if Ed owed Roy the time of the day, let alone the rest of his life.

Roy gathered himself together and looked up into the cabinets.

“I’m sure I’ll have time to regale your brother with my immoderate vocabulary tomorrow,” he said. “How does tomato soup sound?”

“Better than many of the alternatives,” Ed said.

Roy reached for the can.

Roy’s fingertips barely grazed the label.

“Oh,” he said.

“Just _jump_ , you asshole,” Ed said. “You can get the edge and nudge it until you can tip it close enough to—”

“No,” Roy said.

“Then climb on the counter,” Ed said.

Roy looked him directly in the eye. “I’d rather starve.”

Ed swore extensively under his—Roy’s—breath, but then he swung himself up out of the chair and came over, so Roy went to fetch the can opener.

  


* * *

  


Roy had put quite a lot of pepper into the soup. He’d also put quite a lot of garlic powder in, after which Ed had said “Give me _that_ ,” wrenched the little jar out of his hand before he could comply, and dumped in twice again as much. Ed had then said “You’ll thank me later,” which Roy was currently refusing to do regardless of how much it was merited.

There was, however, a problem.

The problem was manifesting in Roy fumbling helplessly with the spoon that he was clasping in his metal hand, desperately trying not to spill stark red soup all down his front. After the other indignities that he’d suffered today, he knew—he _knew_ —that this was one which he would not survive.

The utensil slipped from his unfeeling fingers again, and he reared back from the bowl in the hopes of avoiding the splash.

Ed was watching him. At least he wasn’t laughing outright just yet.

Roy flexed both of his hands, watching the gleam of the right. “It… not having pressure sensitivity is…”

“Challenging,” Ed said. “C’mon, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Forgive me,” Roy said. “I left it in my other pants.” He picked up the spoon again, knowing full well that he was scowling at it like a pouting child. “I’m right-handed.”

“So am I,” Ed said, so cavalierly that Roy couldn’t help the urge to glance up, which was immediately followed by the impulse to stare. “What?” Ed said. “You get used to it. Will you stop panicking? We’re gonna get this whole thing sorted out long before your brain re-wires itself and makes you ambidextrous. Relax.”

“I cannot describe,” Roy said, “how strange it is to hear you speaking those words in my own voice.”

Ed arched Roy’s visible eyebrow—or possibly tried to arch both of them, forgetting the patch. It had taken him a while. “Right back atcha, Mustang.”

Very, very carefully, Roy transferred the spoon from his clattery, nerveless right hand to the clumsy, uncooperative left. It felt like he was performing a very peculiar sort of surgery. He tipped it back and forth for a few seconds. Wrong-handed was better than metal-handed, by the looks of it; and by the simple fact that this one offered any haptic input at all.

“Once I survive this part of the nightmare,” he said, “I think I’ll go find a dictionary so that I can tally how many long words it takes for you to throw a vase at your own head.”

Ed looked at him for just a second too long, just a fraction too seriously, before the shrug.

“It’s had enough damn concussions today,” Ed said. “I’d throw a pillow.”

“How gracious,” Roy said.

“I’d throw it _hard_ ,” Ed said.

  


* * *

  


They unrolled Roy’s rendition of the array across the table without clearing their bowls. Roy felt a swell of retroactive gratitude for the scarred pencil from the workshop, which he’d cast aside even though it had offered him such decent traction against the automail fingers that he’d struggled much less with this task. The dizzying intensity of the adrenaline probably hadn’t hurt; and he knew for a fact that Ed’s body remembered how to scrawl out a circle with one hand, both hands, or the pair of them tied behind its back. Roy had been a lean, mean, and remarkably short array-copying machine in that moment. Ed’s body had risen willingly to that occasion. Apparently it did not see fit to rise to soup.

“What,” Ed said, “a fucking _mess_.”

Roy opened his mouth to say _I told you we could clear the dishes_ and then remembered who he was talking to.

“Well, I’m _sorry_ ,” he said, “that my first attempt to use a hand that—”

“No,” Ed said. “You did great, idiot.” Roy needed a moment to process the fact that an unquantifiable genius had just paid him something that sounded sixty percent complimentary, but he knew he wouldn’t get one. “Kellvern’s damn circle. _Look_ at this thing. He threw the whole fucking kitchen sink in here. This guy’s either a fucking genius, or he just keeps adding shit at random until he lucks out, and—” He sucked in a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. Had Al taught him that, or had the universe that he’d lived in demanded it so many times that he’d had to learn? “Okay. Hold on.” He started to run Roy’s left hand up his face, startled when he encountered the patch, and ran the right hand up instead so that he could shove it into his hair. “It’s okay. It’s fine. Let’s just… let’s think about _everything_ that he did. Right? He had an enclosed target area. The floor itself was fine, which means that it all went directly up, so… directional. His radius must’ve been _really_ precise; let’s see if we can find where he locked that in.” He leaned in so close to the paper that his—Roy’s—nose nearly smudged the graphite. “Hang on. Am I gonna remember this later? I should start writing shit down.”

Roy went to the hopeless miscellanea drawer, rummaged, and brought back a pen. His right shoulder was throbbing like someone had forced him to balance a boulder on it for the past several hours, which he supposed wasn’t quite as far as he would have wanted from the truth.

Ed was eyeing him as he returned. “Why aren’t you saying anything? You love saying things. Saying things is your life’s work.”

“Because it’s completely unnecessary,” Roy said. He tried to stop there, but his traitor of a heart conspired with Ed’s overzealous mouth. “Watching you analyzing alchemy is like watching a master painter work on a portrait.” He just managed to bite back _of someone you love_ , since that… well.

Ed looked at him intently for several more seconds, and Roy fought this body’s extremely strong impulse to squirm.

“This is _so_ weird,” Ed said, slowly, at last. “I feel like I can tell that you’re being honest, ’cause you look the way that I feel when _I’m_ being honest, but…”

Roy held the pen out to him.

Ed took it.

“We’re gonna want to sleep on this,” Ed said even as he started scribbling. He used his right hand. The penmanship was utterly, entirely different from everything that Roy remembered. “I’ll think of something. You might, too, if you ever give thinking about stuff a try.”

“I don’t know,” Roy said. He attempted to roll his right shoulder a little, which only made it worse. “That sounds like it would cut in on my busy schedule of napping and lazing around the office and procrastinating on purpose.”

Ed sighed without even slowing down.

  


* * *

  


As colossally strange as it was to offer Ed his toothbrush, since Ed currently had his teeth, and to select a new one for himself from the cabinet beside the sink, it was even stranger to stand in semi-companionable silence in front of the mirror. Roy had somehow, apparently naïvely, assumed that Ed would prefer to wait, or to ask to be directed to the other bathroom, or… anything but this, really. This was…

This was like the kitchen again, but worse, because the presence of a reflective surface made it even easier to almost-forget.

The fact that Roy had to shove Ed’s ponytail out of the way over his shoulder in order to spit into his own sink helped him remember that this was not, and couldn’t be, what so much of him wanted. If anything, it was just getting likelier by the minute that Ed’s recollections of him and this house and the entire experience would be so awkward and discomfiting that Ed would stay further from him than ever as soon as they’d put this right.

There was a part of Roy—a part that he wasn’t proud of; a part that he wanted to disown but couldn’t carve out and cut loose—that leapt immediately to sabotage. He could spill coffee on the array at breakfast; he could smudge a few strategic lines and erase a sigil here and there and set them back hours, if not days. He could distract; he could mislead; he could misdirect with pointed questions just intelligent enough for Ed to find them plausible. They didn’t know each other quite so well, these days. Even wearing Ed’s transparent face, he could sell it. He could leave them like this for long enough that…

Long enough to constitute betrayal. Long enough to feed another selfish, stupid little fantasy at Ed’s expense. Long enough to use him, to take advantage, to reduce him to a toy soldier for the thousandth time. Long enough to pretend, which was just a softer way of saying _lie_.

He wanted to—wanted to do it; wanted to try; wanted to see how long he could drag it out and soak it in.

Ed had been too damn good for him since the beginning. He’d always known that. He’d always known that _that_ was the real reason that all of it was hopeless. It wasn’t about looks or age or intellect or any of the ordinary things. Ed was a decent person, underneath the thickly-layered shrouds of guilt and shame and self-loathing that Roy would have given the other eye to peel away. Ed was a good man, a good _human being_ , and Roy was not. Roy never had been. Ed had done it all for love, for hope, for family, for devotion. Roy had done it all…

For what? Some self-serving notion that he could make a difference. For self-aggrandizement; for vanity; for egomania. To make himself into something. That was a far crueler kind of human transmutation. This was the price.

Edward Elric was not occupying his master bathroom because his dreams had come true. Ed was not reflected in the water-streaked mirror because he’d chosen to be here—because he’d chosen Roy. Trying to trick him, trying to keep him, trying to force him to stay would amount to an act of violence, and Roy knew too damn well where that road led.

He also had some slightly more pressing concerns.

They stood on either side of the threshold for a very meaningful second, looking at each other. For all of the many, many years of polishing his rhetorical powers to a blinding shine, Roy had absolutely no idea how to say _Well, now we’re both about to have to put a hand on one another’s cocks in order to answer the call of nature, but I promise not to try to make a production of it_.

“There’s another bathroom down the hall,” Roy said. Ed’s voice sounded cautious instead of calculated when he used it like this. “Give me just…”

“Yeah,” Ed said, which set the strangest twist to Roy’s bizarrely distant mouth.

Roy shut the door.

What he’d said earlier was still true. This was business. They both had to stay detached from this; had to treat it like what it was—an accident. An unfortunate, entirely coincidental set of circumstances. It was not an opportunity. It did not have meaning. It did not have weight. It was a room full of sharp objects, not an open door.

Besides—Ed probably wasn’t having any trouble staying detached. Ed probably didn’t want anything to do with Roy; Ed hadn’t given him any indication that this bothered him, let alone _mattered_ to him. Ed had been through so many strange and traumatizing things over the years that this probably didn’t even register.

Roy had to stay calm, and professional, and respectful. That was all. He’d done more; he’d done worse. It wasn’t much to ask of himself, in the grand scheme of things.

He could handle this—which was a very funny pun that he absolutely would not share. The only reason that he’d survived Ishval was that he’d learned how to make himself stop feeling. This was infinitesimal.

This was business.

It actually helped that he had to be so damn careful to keep his right hand well away in order to avoid any unfortunate pinching incidents: his instincts steered him _fervently_ away from that; he kept as much real estate as possible safely inside of his pajama pants; he covered as much as he was capable of with the curled fingers of his left hand; he spent most of the necessary time staring intently at the ceiling.

He was a guest in this body—an interloper, a thief, a cheat. It was nothing short of an alchemic miracle that Ed’s immune system hadn’t rejected him outright. He was only visiting. He needed to keep it clean; take good care of it; return it in better condition than it had been granted to him.

He gave himself fifteen seconds of staring into the mirror to wish, bitterly, that Ed could see himself like this—the casual-looking angle of his shoulders because of the aching weight of the right; the gleam of silver from the edge of the too-wide collar of Roy’s sweatshirt, which he made look so staggeringly perfect that fleece and cotton might as well have been ordained by some benevolent higher power specifically for him to wear someday.

Ed had always been arresting; he’d come back stunningly attractive, but _now_ —

Roy knew, somehow. Partly he remembered—he’d numbed himself out to the fingertips, not so long ago; he’d run himself ragged and ground himself down—but partly he sensed it. Partly he just _felt_ it, in the way that Ed radiated so many of his feelings even now, even as he tried so hard to suffocate any cause for sympathy.

Ed treated his body as a vessel. He was a ruthlessly pragmatic scientist, yes, and that was a factor in it. But it was also because he hated it. He resented its resiliency; he resented himself simply for _having_ it for all those years when Al had had nothing. He thought the automail was off-putting—thought it was hideous, probably; Ed never did a damn thing by halves. He tried to separate himself from his physical form and imagine it as purely utilitarian, because trying to enjoy it felt like a crime against brotherhood and a long-lost cause.

Roy had wondered, sometimes, in the intervening years, if the deliberate deprivations might have given way to occasional indulgences in that other place, because such a large part of it had always been rooted in a desperate quest to make things fair for Al.

Perhaps it was wrong to say that Roy had wondered—he had _hoped_. He’d even managed sincerity, sometimes. He’d hoped that Ed was happy, or at least happi _er_.

He supposed, though, that it was only fair that two universes wouldn’t grant him one wish between them.

With one hour and a partly-flat surface, Roy could have _proved_ to Ed how fucking beautiful he was; with half the time and half the space, Roy could have brought him to the edge of something so extraordinary that his curiosity would force him to discover so much _more_ —

He’d spent more than fifteen seconds looking in the mirror now.

Roy’s job now was to be kinder to this shape than its owner knew how to be, or saw reason to.

He washed Ed’s face thoroughly, scrubbing dust out of the soft, pale hairs around Ed’s ears. He dredged the dirt out from underneath Ed’s fingernails—which was a trial and a half; the automail played worse with the clippers and the tweezers than it had with the spoon—and cleaned all the little cuts and scrapes.

The rest of Ed’s hair proved every bit as much of a nightmare to deal with as it was a dream to stare at. Roy did not have the slightest idea how Ed coped, most of the time, with having so _much_ of it. It was a frankly irresponsible amount of hair, and combing it out took the better part of a century, and then Roy couldn’t figure out how to tie it up without tangling the automail hand in it so deeply that they’d have to cut it loose, so he just sort of gathered all of the hair at the back of Ed’s neck and snapped the tie around it.

He only ran his left-hand fingers through the length of it once. Once could be attributed to ordinary interest, couldn’t it? Once could have been innocent curiosity.

It felt fucking divine.

He rubbed Ed’s eyes carefully with the now-much-more-sanitary knuckles of his left hand—one at a time. Three hands and three eyes between them; nothing in a matched set. Maybe it wasn’t any wonder that an array had tried to merge them, and, failing that, had flipped their minds instead.

Five more seconds. Five set aside for the worst of the weakness—five for imagining that he was seeing this from his own eye, watching Ed tug down the shoved-up sleeves of the oversized sweatshirt and step across the threshold and gaze with a fond familiarity at the crumpled sheets of the comfortable bed.

Four.

Three.

Two.

He went over and straightened and smoothed out all of the bedclothes, which only seemed polite. He fluffed the pillows a little bit for good measure.

Then he stepped out into the hall, where he hadn’t precisely _expected_ to see Ed in his involuntarily-loaned-out body, but where he also hadn’t expected to see the linen closet door left open.

He held onto the banister all the way down the stairs and followed the rustling into his living room. Ed had constructed something that looked much more like a nest than like a sofa made up to be a bed.

“I was going to sleep down here,” Roy said. His left hand kept wanting to rise and lay itself against his right shoulder, where the pain had given up on smoldering and simply caught fire.

“Like fuck you are,” Ed said. He adjusted the pillow he’d pilfered and then stepped back, putting his hands on his hips to admire his handiwork. He did that altogether too often; it looked positively melodramatic on Roy. “People who take ten years to pee don’t get to make the rules anyway.”

“This is my house,” Roy said.

“Not right now, it’s not,” Ed said, smirking at him, and _oh_ , the way his blood boiled _instantly_ shocked him almost as much as it shivered through him hot.

Roy closed his eyes, breathed in, held it, breathed o—

“Fuck off and go get some sleep already,” Ed said, lower and gentler but somehow still rough with the sheer informality of it, and Roy’s eyes snapped back open, because his voice was _not_ meant to be abused like that. “I don’t care. I slept on the ground a lot; your couch is a hell of a step up from most of the places… anyway. You’re gonna need your brain tomorrow, so go rest it.”

“Really,” Roy said. He planted his feet wide on the carpet, which somehow made him feel slightly less… small. “I insist. It would be unimaginably inconsiderate of me to—”

“ _Go_ ,” Ed said. He made a shooing motion. With _Roy’s hands_.

“You are,” Roy said, “the single most intolerably ill-mannered human being that I have ever had the tragic misfortune of—” Ed was climbing into the makeshift couch-bed. “Would it kill you to _listen_ to me when I’m degrading you?”

“Why take a chance?” Ed said, settling down with an overstated wriggle that looked impossibly wrong as it shifted through Roy’s shoulders. “You should remember that one for tomorrow, though. Al’s gonna love it.”

“Get off my couch,” Roy said, “and go sleep in the bed like a civilized—”

Ed put Roy’s fingers in his ears.

Roy put both hands over his face, and the automail felt startlingly cold from the last time that he’d washed them. It stopped the spatter of venom in his brain, jerked him to a stop and made him think—

That Ed hadn’t touched the eyepatch.

It was possible that he’d lifted it in the bathroom for a look, but the dust caked on it and smeared at Roy’s hairline made him wonder if Ed had moved it at all.

And that made him wonder if Ed’s insistence could, just _possibly_ , have less to do with him being a pigheaded contrary little brat than it did with the reverse of Roy’s own damn insistence. Maybe Ed just wanted him to sleep comfortably. Maybe Ed, thinking of Roy discovering all these brand-new kinds of aching and pulling and tension hauling ceaselessly at the tendons in his neck and the muscles in his back, wanted him to have the bed, because he didn’t want Roy to hurt any more tomorrow morning than he had to.

Roy was the curator of this body—hopefully, _hopefully_ , just for tonight.

“Fine,” he said. “You win.”

The not-so-borrowed smugness in Ed’s borrowed grin should have bothered him more than it did.

Just as he crossed the threshold to step out of the room, the intake of his own breath from across it made him pause.

He looked over his left shoulder, which stretched the right, which made it worse.

Ed blinked, but his mouth was partly open, which meant—

“Try sleeping on your back,” Ed said. “It… balances it better than most of your alternatives.”

Roy’s eye looked kinder when Ed was wearing it—softer somehow.

“Thank you,” Roy said. He tried hard to smile, and tried harder to make it sound ordinary: “Sleep well.”

“You, too,” Ed said.


End file.
